Ron Padgett reads excerpts from Blaise Cendrars’s poem “Tower,” 1913.

In “Tower,” Blaise Cendrars invokes Robert Delaunay, whose series of Eiffel Tower paintings shares the same subject as this poem.

Transcript
Padgett: "Tower," by Blaise Cendrars.

1910
Castellammare
I was dining on an orange in the shade of an orange tree
When, suddenly . . .
It wasn’t the eruption of Vesuvius
It wasn’t the cloud of grasshoppers, one of the ten plagues of Egypt
Nor Pompeii
It wasn’t the resuscitated cries of giant mastodons
It wasn’t the heralded Trumpet
Nor Pierre Brisset’s frog
When, suddenly,
Fires
Jolts
Surging
Spark of simultaneous horizons
My sex

                                O Eiffel Tower!
I didn’t give you golden slippers
I didn’t make you dance on crystal tiles
I didn’t vow you to the Python like a Carthaginian virgin
I didn’t clothe you in the peplos of Greece
I never made you wander about in a circle of menhirs
I didn’t name you Rood of David or Wood of the Cross
Lignum Crucis
                                O Eiffel Tower
Giant fireworks of the Universal Exposition!

…

O celestial plummet!
For the Simultaneous Delaunay, to whom I dedicate this poem,
You’re the brush he dips in light

Gong tom-tom Zanzibar jungle animal X rays express scalpel symphony
You are everything
Tower
Ancient god
Modern animal
Solar spectrum
Subject of my poem
Tower
World tour tower
Moving tower

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